This has nothing to do with polling but I'm from Ann Arbor and I think it's interesting so I'm blogging about it.

Somehow I never heard about this even when Bill Ayers was prominent in the news last fall, but the excellent Ann Arbor Chronicle reported yesterday that Ayers was a one time Ann Arbor School Board candidate.

I got my start working in electoral politics on some highly charged and competitive Ann Arbor BOE races early in this decade so that piqued my interest. I e-mailed my dad, the reference librarian, and asked him to send me any information he could find on Ayers' candidacy.

Dad reports that Ayers was one of eight candidates in the 1968 election. He finished in last place with 1,781 votes, well behind even the 7th place finisher, who received 3,606 votes. The three winners in the at large contest earned anywhere between 6,352 and 8,032 votes.

Some of Ayers' more colorful quotes on the campaign trail included 'The crying need is to liberate the kids from the suffocating regimentation that passes for education' and 'The kind of meaningful education envisioned here cannot be attained without radical changes in the structure of our whole society.'

I guess Ayers decided that running for the School Board was too mundane a way to achieve the change he was looking for because he started participating in bombings the next year.

Apparently you can survive an election in which your opponents try to tar you with Bill Ayers...but you can't make it through one actually being Bill Ayers.

Civitas has some interesting new numbers out looking at the favorability of Richard Burr and potential opponents Roy Cooper and Heath Shuler.

They find that Burr's favorability is 37/10, Cooper's is 32/2, and Shuler's is 17/2.

Those may seem like awfully low levels of unfavorability for the trio. The reason is that Civitas didn't provide party labels when asking voters what they think of the candidates. We do identify the candidates with their party, and it would appear that the higher levels of unfavorability we found for each of these candidates in our most recent polls (30% for Burr, 21% for Shuler, 23% for Cooper) may have been more a reaction to party labels than to the candidates themselves.

A couple interesting things that pop out in the crosstabs:

-Cooper's 36% favorability rating with Republican's is higher than his 32% favorability rating with Democrats! That's a pretty remarkable finding. There's no doubt Cooper is very well respected across party lines. The question is whether he can convince enough Republicans to vote for the person instead of the party. On our poll last month 31% of Republicans approved of Cooper's job performance, much better than the 16% of Democrats who approved of Burr's performance. But Burr still led Cooper 52-35 among Republicans who held a positive opinion of Cooper.

-Shuler's net favorability of +40 in the Mountains (46/6) is the best any of the three candidates have in any region of the state.

Bottom line: this poll gives some confirmation of what we've been telling you since the summer. Burr has very low name recognition for someone who's been in statewide office for the last four years, to the extent that his incumbency may not be worth as much as it usually is for a sitting Senator. Now that Mel Martinez, George Voinovich, and Kit Bond have all announced they won't run for reelection I have no doubt Burr is the most endangered incumbent in the country for 2010.

Bill Ritter's taken a bit of a hit with Hispanic voters since choosing Michael Bennet to replace Ken Salazar rather than appointing another Hispanic to take his place.

Our newest poll finds Ritter's approval rating at 47/40. That +7 net approval rating is a drop from when it was +13 at 49/36 in mid-December shortly after it was announced Salazar would become Interior Secretary. Almost all the downward movement for Ritter since that time has come with Hispanics. Where before the Bennet appointment his approval with that group was 54/30, it's now slightly negative at 44/48. He may have some fence mending to do there.

A PPP survey in December had shown that 50% of Hispanics in the state wanted either Federico Pena or John Salazar to be appointed as Ken Salazar's replacement.

Overall Ritter's approval rating with voters who hold an unfavorable opinion of Bennet is just 8%.

In a hypothetical rematch with 2006 opponent Bob Beauprez, Ritter leads 46-40, an outcome much closer than Ritter's 57-40 victory the first time around. That's in spite of the fact that Beauprez is not viewed at all positively by most voters in the state, with 45% holding an unfavorable opinion of him compared to only 31% who have a favorable opinion of him. Beauprez leads Ritter 50-36 with the usually reliably Democratic Hispanic demographic in that contest.

Ritter has a much more comfortable lead, 52-38, in a possible contest against former Congressman Tom Tancredo. He has a 53-35 lead with Hispanics in that match up, no great surprise given Tancredo's choice of issues to beat the drum on during his time in Washington.

Overall Ritter is fine. He leads Beauprez, who sounds like he's more likely be a Senate candidate anyway, 48-38 among white voters and he has a 52-38 edge over Tancredo with that demographic. Any Democrat in Colorado who wins the white vote is going to win a statewide contest in a walk. The displeasure some Hispanic voters are having with Ritter is what's driving down his numbers a little bit this month but that trend seems likely to revert to normal with time. He's still a strong favorite for reelection.

Gallup has some fascinating new state level party id data out today, but at the end of the day it just reminds me that party id is somewhat of a nebulous thing where there are no clear answers, and that even data as rigorously compiled as what they released today still does not provide any clear 'answers' as to the real party breakdown of the electorate in a particular state.

Background: one of the toughest decisions PPP had to make in conducting its polls last year was whether to weight for party id. Ultimately we decided not to. The main reason was that we really weren't sure, if we did weight for party id, what numbers we should be using. Should we use past exit polls? The most recent Gallup data? The most recent Pew data? What if party id shifted back and forth over the course of the year in relation to various events? Weighting to an out of date or incorrect party id target in a particular state could foul up an otherwise well conducted poll. Ultimately we decided just to weight for gender, race, and age and let party id fall where it fell and given that a Wall Street Journal analysis of swing state pollsters soon after the election showed us as one of the two most accurate in the country I don't regret it.

It was a decision we took some flak for, particularly from Republicans, because the party id breakdowns our polls found tended to be much more Democratic than what the exit polls showed even for the very Democratic year of 2006. I have a feeling Democrats in the next few years may use the Gallup data to criticize our polls for being too Republican in their party breakdowns.

Our polls in Indiania, Missouri, Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, Virginia, Pennsylvania, New Mexico, Oregon, Colorado, and West Virginia last year all came within two points of the correct margin so those seem like a good launching point to look at how the party id we found differs from Gallup and from the exit polls:

State

PPP Party ID

Gallup Party ID

Exit Poll Party ID

Indiana

R+1

D+9

R+5

Missouri

D+3

D+11

D+6

Florida

D+3

D+9

D+3

North Carolina

D+11

D+11

D+11

Ohio

D+6

D+18

D+6

Virginia

D+5

D+9

D+6

Pennsylvania

D+9

D+16

D+7

New Mexico

D+17

D+14

D+16

Oregon

D+14

D+17

D+11

Colorado

D+3

D+11

R+1

West Virginia

D+10

D+19

D+14

Our polls in these states were pretty much right. The exit polls get to adjust their numbers to fit the final outcome so they're certainly right. And Gallup's research was very rigorous. Nevertheless there are major disparities in the party id breakdown the three organizations find in every state except North Carolina, Virginia, and New Mexico. Those differences are particularly large in states like Indiana, where there was a 14 point difference between the findings of Gallup and the exit polls, Ohio, where there was a 12 point difference between Gallup and what both PPP and the exit polls found, and Colorado, where again there was a 12 point difference between Gallup and the exit polls.

Nate Silver has correctly pointed to a few of the reasons the Gallup numbers are so Democratic. While the exit polls were surveying actual voters and we were surveying likely voters, they were just talking to adults in general. Also, they prodded independents to say they leaned toward a particular party, which in last year's political climate meant more respondents identifying as Democrats. Still, those small differences in methodology don't explain some of the huge differences the organizations here found for party id in particular states.

I don't think any of the companies here is necessarily right or wrong- the truth is that when it comes to party id, particularly at the state level, there is no 'correct' black and white answer. And even if there was, it might be different six months from now.

While PPP, Gallup, and 2008 exit polls show disparate party identification breakdowns for most states in the country, the one where all three organizations converge is North Carolina with a finding that there are 11% more voters who identify themselves as Democrats than Republicans in the state. A full discussion of the party id issue here.

In 2004 exit polls actually showed a 1% Republican party identification advantage in the state, so this is quite a shift over the last four years.

Based on the current registration numbers in the state Democrats have a 14 point advantage, with 46% of voters in the state registered as Democrats and 32% as Republicans. The reason the identification advantage is narrower is that many voters who have been registered as Democrats since the 60s or 70s may actually be more likely to vote Republican now, particularly at the federal level, but have not bothered changing their official registration.

Topline results are below. Full results, including crosstabs, can be found here.

Q1 Generally speaking, do you think you wouldvote for a Democrat or Republican for the USSenate in 2010? If you would vote Democratic,press 1. If Republican, press 2. If you’re notsure, press 3.Democrat ........................................................ 45%Republican...................................................... 42%Not Sure.......................................................... 13%

Very few Democrats actually seem to be unhappy with the Bennet appointment, an indication that he may not be particularly susceptible to a primary challenge next year. Only 7% of folks within his party have an unfavorable opinion of him, with 55% looking on him positively. Even with 38% unsure, an 8:1 favorability ratio with your base tends to preclude a lot of internal danger. He also gets good marks from independents, with 34% having a positive opinion of him to just 14% who don't.

Bennet's primary focus over the next two years should come with two groups of voters: Hispanics and those outside the Denver metro area. 58% of Hispanics are ambivalent toward Bennet at this point, a higher percentage than in any other group and an indication he may need to prove he can represent them as well as Ken Salazar did. Similarly, while Bennet has a 40:21 favorability rating in metro Denver, he's still a blank slate to 54% of voters in the rest of the state. If he can improve his standing within those two demographics he'll be in good shape for reelection.

PPP tested Bennet against four potential 2010 opponents. Two of them, John Suthers and Scott McInnis, made the poll obsolete yesterday by announcing they will not be candidates next year. Bennet led Suthers 40-34 and McInnis 43-37.

In the other hypothetical matches Bennet leads Tom Tancredo 48-39 and trails former Governor Bill Owens 44-41. Still, even the Owens showing seems pretty strong for Bennet given that most voters in the state had never heard of him five weeks ago. That close match against Owens comes even as Bennet leads the Hispanic vote just 45-40 at this very early stage, a performance Bennet would likely exceed by a good deal given how that vote broke down in the 2008 election cycle in the state.

The bottom line? Bennet has a lot of work to do to introduce himself to the voters of the state. But overall the state's blueward trend makes it appear he is in a strong position for reelection, and the GOP will really have to recruit a top tier challenger to knock him off.

Sarah Steelman is apparently headed to Washington this week to try to round up support for a 2010 Missouri Senate bid.

When you look at our poll from a couple weeks ago, she might seem like a strong candidate. Her +7 net favorability ratio was better than the other potential Republican candidates. Jim Talent's was +6 and Roy Blunt's came in at -3.

The problem for Steelman, at least as far as securing the Republican nomination goes, is that her numbers are better because she does better with Democrats than Talent and Blunt do. But she's the least popular of the trio within her own party. Talent is the potential candidate viewed most favorably by Republican voters, with 78% having a positive opinion of him and 14% rating him negatively. For Blunt the breakdown is 70/17. Steelman's is 51/18. In other words, she has the most Republicans holding an unfavorable opinion of her, while her favorables run 19 points behind Blunt and 27 points behind Talent. That doesn't bode very well for her chances if she decides to make a run but can't clear the field.

We found a similar trend when we tested both Steelman and Kenny Hulshof against Jay Nixon back in July. Steelman only trailed Nixon by 5 points, while Hulshof had a 10 point deficit. But if you looked deeper into the numbers, Hulshof was getting 71% of the GOP vote against Nixon while Steelman was polling at just 63%. Steelman polled better than Hulshof against Nixon because she had a stronger performance among Democrats and independents, but that obviously wasn't enough to get her out of the primary last year and our numbers indicate she could have the same problem again next year if there are multiple top tier Republican candidates. That crossover support she enjoys is nice, but she needs to win a nomination before it does much for her.

PPP POLLS BY YEAR: 2006-2015

We came to PPP after a public poll in the San Jose Mayoral race showed our opponent ahead by 8 points. They found our candidate (Sam Liccardo) ahead by 3 points and that allowed us to be able to push back with the press against the perception that our opponent was now a strong favorite in the race. Sam ended up winning by 2 points and is now the next Mayor of San Jose. PPP worked very fast and had a very accurate read on the electorate when we needed them–Eric Jaye, Storefront Political Media.

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